Jealous husband who cut down the woods where Byron wooed his wife
This book follows an epic sweep across place and time, but the original inspiration behind it couldn’t be more mundane: the author’s mother painting her front door red. But in the 1960s, when Gill Stafford turned up at the dreary married quarters in the Royal Air Force station at Scampton, Lincolnshire, eastern England, all doors were still daubed dull black and khaki from wartime restrictions. So she took up her brush and applied a couple of coats of vivid vermilion. By the time she left, RAF maintenance had given in and all the doors were painted in a variety of different colours.
Gill’s door stood for a new beginning, but also a rebellion against the traumas of the Blitz and austerity – becoming what her daughter Fiona Stafford calls a door into the past as well as the future.
Her book, then, uses similar symbolic ‘red doors’ to open up worlds past and present and offer a history of British – and one or two Irish – landscapes. Stafford’s wanderings appear to be a mixture of recent trips and memories of past ones, going back to her childhood, intermingled with literary anecdotes. The book jumps from place to place in themes, rather than geography.
Nevertheless, you find yourself drawn into a journey through some fascinating landscapes. It takes in Fingal’s Cave, the drowned village of Capel Celyn in Wales,
the Hebridean island of Barra, which inspired the book Whisky Galore, to the place where the first monkey puzzle tree was so named (Pencarrow in Cornwall) and even the wreck of the Spanish Armada off Streedagh in Sligo. Along with this is a wealth of descriptive writing that makes you feel that you are there with Stafford, tramping across fens, buffeted by waves along rugged coastlines or peering down iron mines to see the red ochre. Stafford is a professor of English at Somerville College, Oxford, and it shows – the book is stuffed full of literary anecdotes and erudite learning, but it’s done lightly, and it’s often very funny. I particularly enjoyed the Sherwood Forest chapter, which recounts how Lord Byron wrote some romantic verse recalling his early love for a woman called Mary Chaworth and the trees near Annesley village that they used to sit under together. On reading this poem, Mary’s husband John Musters was so enraged that he promptly chopped down the trees in question.
Stafford also weaves in her own family history – as well as the anecdote about her mother, she frequently talks about her father Tom, a young air-gunner in the war. But perhaps the most touching chapter is about haaf-netting – a method of catching salmon using a net on a large rectangular frame that is believed to stretch back as far as the Vikings.
Stafford is stopped short when by chance she comes across an obscure 1965 film about haaf-netting on the web, only to be confronted by the reporter interviewing a fisherman in a tweed suit. She realises it is none other than her grandfather John, who narrowly escaped drowning while practising the craft – a poignant discovery of a loved relative. Time And Tide can meander as much as some of the terrains it describes, so it deserves a slow and thoughtful read. It is a book to be enjoyed in front of a cosy fire whiling away a rainy Sunday afternoon.